Four short links: 20 October 2011

Earth's Birthday, Messy Data, Evil iOS Apps, and Cooking Chemistry

Earth Turns 6015 — my plan to celebrate on Saturday the amazing thing that is our universe. Scientists know humility, curiosity, and awe. All the scientists I know speak of their awe at the natural world. I’d like to see data scientists take a moment to soak in the complexity of a problem, appreciating it in all its tangled majesty, separate from attempts to unravel it.

Data Jujitsu — Luke Wroblewski took notes at DJ Patil’s Web 2.0 Expo talk, and this caught my eye: Unstructured data is harder to work with. Open text fields in forms are can cause issues. There are between 4 and 8 thousand variations of IBM and “Software Engineer” in LinkedIn’s database.